“Your Voice Speaking in my Poems”: Polyphony in Fleur Adcock

Abstract

Fleur Adcock was born and spent her first five years in New Zealand, but her family moved to England in 1939 and spent the war years there. She has written that her father “seems to have no concept of ‘home’”¹ so that they moved around obsessively and in “seven and a half years I attended eleven English schools, with a New Zealand one at each end to make it thirteen” (R.B., 5). Moving back to New Zealand in 1947

I lost my much derided English accent and, after a time, some of my sense of cultural displacement. I learned to live with an almost permanent sense of free floating, unfocused nostalgia, and with the combination of crushed humility and confident arrogance that comes from not quite belonging. It is no bad thing to be an outsider, if one wants to see places and events clearly enough to write about them. At any rate an outsider seemed to be what, after so much practice at it, I had become.

(R.B., 12)